Microsoft 365

Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Teams are what you are most likely to be handed on your first day. The good news is that they are among the best supported software for screen readers and magnification anywhere. The catch is that how accessible any given file is depends almost entirely on how the person who made it built it.

Most of the difficulty people bring to us is not the software. It is a document with no headings, a spreadsheet with merged cells, or a slide deck where every slide is one large image.

• F6 is the key that matters. It moves between the document, the ribbon, the status bar and any open panes. Shift plus F6 goes back the other way.
• Control plus F6 switches between open documents. Quicker than going out to the taskbar when you have several files on the go.
• Alt opens the ribbon. From there the key tips let you reach any command by name rather than hunting through menus.
• Use Styles, not big bold text. Applying Heading 1 and Heading 2 in Word is what lets you, and everyone after you, jump around the document. Text that is merely large and bold is invisible to navigation.
• Check your own work. The Accessibility Checker on the Review tab flags missing alt text, poor contrast and unstructured tables before your document reaches anybody else.

• A spreadsheet reads as endless numbers. Without a defined header row, every cell is announced with no context. Naming the header row changes the whole experience of the file.
• A PDF exported from Word is unreadable. Use Save as PDF and leave the document structure tags option switched on. Printing to PDF strips the structure out entirely.
• Teams meetings move too fast. Live captions and the meeting transcript are both worth turning on, and the transcript is searchable afterwards.
• Dictation gets the words but not the punctuation. Dictate in Word responds to spoken punctuation. Say comma, full stop and new paragraph as you go.

Almost everyone we train, because almost every employer uses it. If your role involves producing documents other people depend on, the accessibility side of Office is worth an afternoon of anyone's time, including colleagues who are not disabled themselves.